The Pensieve

Inside a Text Editor Ever since my college days, after dabbling with vi and a few other editors, I always had an yearning to create my own. Now, I am still stuck with XEmacs and jEdit and had a chance to compile / study the sources and documentation of EMACS and a free editor component called Scintilla. Until now, I was under the the belief that text editors used a doubly linked list to represent the text in memory. The advantages of this approach being insertions and deletions are much more easier which is just a matter of just un-linking a node off the list. But the shortcomming is that they tend to fragment memory with each node or line take a bit of memory. The other alternative approach is to have a dynamic array which is a contiguous space of memory and can sometimes be directly written off to a file. The disadvantages are that insertion and deletion are costly and you need to reallocate quite frequently. While goint throug the source and documentation of text editors, I chanced ...

XEmacs - Still resisting the dark side The other day, I had been contemplating changing to a fancier text editor. Though I do little programming now, I still find a need for a programmer's editor as I will be frequently writing simple scripts or processing csv files created by Microsoft Excel or log files. The other editor that I am familiar with is JEdit , which I had used for a brief period and have even contributed a macro . It had a good GUI, syntax highlighting for numerous programming languages and scripts, searching capability, plugin support, extensibility and so on. But, the one point it faltered was on the memory usage side. Just opening the editor took away a good 40MB of my scarce RAM. I guess it needed the memory to display those fancy icons and GUI controls. XEmacs in comparison, ends up using less than 10MB and is way faster too. Some indispensable commands Over the course of time, I have started relying on a few commands, so useful that I use them almost daily. You...

XEmacs init.el It's been almost eleven years since when I was introduced to GNU EMACS. It came in as a DOS based editor which failed to load files that were over 640k. This was followed by DPMI support which provided flaky support to open files larger than than and unreliable under Windows 3.1. I then migrated to GNU EMACS on win32 and finally settled down with XEmacs on XP. Over the years, my (X)EMACS config file has and still undergoing changes and here is the latest configuration that I maintain. Note: I am not a lisp hacker, but have basically accumulated a list of handy configuration options and snippets that were indispensable during the course of my programming career. ;; ;; Shoban's XEmacs init.el ;; ;; ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; load paths ;(pushnew "~/.xemacs/xemacs-packages/dmacro" load-path :test 'equal) (pushnew "~/.xemacs/xemacs-packages" load-path :test 'equal) (setq Info-directory-list ...